1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a computer program product, system, and method for using geographical location information to provision one or more target storages for a source device.
2. Description of the Related Art
In network computing environments, an administrator will typically provision backup storage devices to backup data from the source devices in the network. The administrator may select one or more backup or target storages to receive the source device data. Selection of a data protection solution for storage devices generally depends on arbitrary decisions or heuristics for selecting a data protection target. For example, all application servers supporting an organization might be backed up to the same centrally located data-protection server, even though the protected application servers are geographically dispersed. Such an approach may result in operational inefficiency and/or inadequate disaster protection, especially in complex environments with dispersed data assets.
Further, in many customer environments, the location of the client data is in close proximity to the location of the data protection server to which the data is being sent. In such configurations, if a disaster were to befall the location of the backup and source data, then all copies of the data may be lost. To guard against such occurrences, many customers make off-site copies of data, or use replication technologies (such as IBM® Tivoli® Storage Manager Node Replication) to make a disaster recovery copy. (IBM and Tivoli are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation throughout the world)
There is a need in the art for improved techniques for provisioning storage resources to client data for data protection and backup.